3 Things You're Forgetting to Do With Your AC

As soon as you installed and flipped on your AC this sweltering summer, you probably sighed with relief — and then tensed up again at the thought of your next electric bill. To keep your unit running efficiently, don't skip these critical maintence steps.

1. Make sure the area around your AC is sealed.
This is the key to keeping a room cool on a hot summer day. Most ACs come with accordion flaps that help with this issue, but often they don't fit quite right. Foam weather strips are a cheap and effective to fill in gaps. You can easily cut them to size and compress them into holes to block out hot air. Don't forget the gap between sliding windows that appears when you lift the bottom window to install your unit.

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2. Keep the unit clean.
Air conditioners can become dusty and grimy over the summer, so when you put yours away at the season's end, give it a quick clean. The coils, those tightly packed metal sheets on the front and back of the unit, accumulate the most dust. With a moist cloth or paper towel, wipe with the grain of coils to avoid damaging them. Using a can of compressed air can also whisk away dust. Do the same for the front coils, which is behind the filter (you should also regularly rinse that with water to get rid of dust). If you have a central AC system, have the unit cleaned and serviced by a professional once a season.

3. Use a window fan at night.
On all but the hottest summer nights, a window fan is very effective way to bring cool air in from outside, and it's much cheaper than running central air or a window unit. The trick is to install the fan facing outward in a window on one side of a room. Then open another window on the opposite side of the room. When the fan's on, it will blow stuffy air out the window and create a draft that pulls in fresh outside air via the other open window.

A Word of Warning
If you have a central AC system or car AC system that needs to be recharged with new refrigerant, the EPA recently released a warning against using refrigerants with "22a" or "R-22a" in the name. They're not approved for use in existing air-conditioning systems, and contain highly flammable ingredients, like propane. Find a list of approved refrigerants here, and be sure to call a trained technician to handle the job.

Gordon Grajek is a test engineer in the Consumer Electronics lab of the Good Housekeeping Research Institute.